Why The Mainstream Media Wishes Jesus Had a Wife
via ‘Jesus Said to Them, “My Wife…”‘ | Christianity Today.
A newly revealed piece of papyrus offers evidence that some early Christians believed Jesus was married, according to a Harvard Divinity School professor.
A fourth-century codex in Coptic quotes Jesus referring to “my wife,” Karen King, a scholar of early Christianity, said on Tuesday. It is the only extant text in which Jesus is explicitly portrayed as betrothed, according to King.
King is calling the receipt-sized slip of papyrus “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” She believes it was originally written in Greek, and later translated into Coptic, an Egyptian language.
The fragment says, “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife…,’” according to King. The rest of the sentence is cut off. Another segment says, “As for me, I dwell with her in order to…” The speaker is not named.
The fragment contains just 33 words spread across 14 incomplete lines—less a full-fledged gospel than an ancient crossword puzzle.
“Christian tradition has long held that Jesus was not married, even though no reliable historical evidence exists to support that claim,” King said in a statement released Tuesday by Harvard. “This new gospel doesn’t prove that Jesus was married, but it tells us that the whole question only came up as part of vociferous debates about sexuality and marriage.”
Tuesday’s surprise announcement seemed ripped from the pages of Brown’s 2003 novel, The Da Vinci Code, which sold millions of copies—and irked the Vatican—by suggesting that Catholic leaders had covered up Jesus’ marriage to Mary Magdalene. King said that she does not believe that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. “At least, don’t say this proves Dan Brown was right,” she told The New York Times.
This non-story really has no business receiving the high level of attention the mainstream media has given it. The Gnostic heresy that Jesus married is already widely known and this scrap provides no new information as to the claim’s historicity.
The reason why secularists are so eager for even the most feeble evidence hinting at the existence of Hubby Christ is because such a revelation would demonstrate more or less conclusively that Jesus was not divine and that my Christian friends are all a bunch of idiots for having faith in Him as their Savior. If Jesus’s crucifiction really was about what Christians say it was — and Jesus knew he was God — then he would never have married. It would have been cruel of him to do so. You marry a woman and have kids — the purpose of marriage originally — and then you abandon them to a life of loneliness and poverty without you just because you’ve got to go die for the sin of the world?
Talk about the ultimate deadbeat dad: “Sorry I couldn’t make child support this month, honey. I’ve been a little busy paying off the debt for the collective evil of all humanity by letting Roman soldiers pound giant nails into my body.”
If Saturday Night Live didn’t make a sketch like that during the height of the Da Vinci Code‘s popularity then don’t be surprised if one’s on the agenda for this week.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle on Christianity:
Because they wanna turn Jesus into Pedohammed. Next they’re gonna say Jesus married a 7 year-old girl named Shantelle -a la Aisha/Pedohammed).
I glanced at a news story about this but when I saw the word “Harvard”, which is synonymous with “politicized B.S.” I quickly moved on.
Yawn. Didn’t Sam Kenison do the Married Jesus bit 25 years ago?…
This slip of papyrus is, they say, the size of a calling card, with barely-legible writing.
Extrapolating an entire gospel from such a fragment is akin to fantasizing an entire dinosaur from a single sliver of bone. Unless there is a recognizable quote from a standard Biblical text on a portion of this tiny slip, who is to say that it is even about Jesus anyway? It’s not as though he was the only person named Yehoshua in the Eastern Mediterranean; it could just as easily be the fourth-century equivalent of a Niagara Falls postcard home from one of the cataracts of the Nile.
For that matter, the Shekhinah embodies the female attributes of God in Jewish belief; if this slip of writing is about the Jesus, and if it does not specify the name of his “wife,” it is entirely possible that it is referring to his “marriage” to these female aspects of the Divine, such as mercy.
There are many possibilities, even if the item turns out to be genuinely ancient.
– and the Church has been the “bride” of Christ for centuries. Wife, bride, same thing?
Ya know, Davey, you really make Christians look like obnoxious, smarmy pr*cks. So repugnant.
Or rather you think that Christians are obnoxious, smarmy pricks. I’m not a Christian so any bigotry that you should be feeling toward people of faith should be directed toward my religious faith, Hermeticism.
What’s the big deal? It was normal for first century Jews, men and women, to get married. It was abnormal not to. If you want to claim Jesus was “god/man”, then being a first century Jew would make it very unusual not to be married. How would have any consequence on the “god” half of the equation? If Jesus was really god, then he still was even if the man side was married.
This wasn’t even an issue until the late second century when Clement of Alexandria made it an issue. Clement thought it wasn’t “fitting” for the saviour to be married. So the bachelor Jesus was just Clement’s opinion. There’s no documentation to back up his claim either. Calling this a “Gnostic heresy” is silly.
Look, if you believe the Bible is Divinely inspired, then this is all Wrong. We all get that. To an awful lot of other people, including people who believe in the Divinity of Christ, our Bible as it stands was the result of a political process in 382 that determined what would and wouldn’t be included, and a fairly continuous editorial process that continues to this day.
The Gnostics lost in that process, which is why they’re Gnostic Heresies and not Gnostic Church Fathers or something. But that doesn’t mean the Gnostics disappeared from history. There were other traditions that didn’t have Roman Emperors and powerful archbishops behind them that made Mary Magdalene more important than St Jerome and Pope Damasus’s Council did.
What this text did was show that those traditions were apparently alive about the same time as the Council of Rome. This is inherently interesting, plus those traditions have gotten into popular literature with everything from Dan Brown to the Holy Blood Holy Grail books. So, people are interested. That’s why it gets into the press.
Which illustrates why Sola Scriptura is invalid. However, when you include the doctrine of Ecclesiastical Infallibility, then you have a coherent belief system.
Quite a charitable view you have of the mainstream media all of a sudden, Charlie.
Discovery the fragment of papyrus derives on fourth century contains Jesus’ words “my wife,” whom Jesus identifies as Mary Magdalene. Jesus does not have a wife and was not married. The Bible overrules very clearly that Jesus was not married: http://koti.phnet.fi/petripaavola/marymagdalene.html
Naturally we gotta go with a photo depicting JC as Nordic, unlike everyone else…
It seems Dr. King of Harvard has yet to compare the ink of her slip of papyrus against known 4th Century Coptic writings.
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/harvard-claim-jesus-wife-papyrus-scrutinized
It’s either Gnostic twaddle or a reference to the bride of Christ, i.e., the church. In other breaking news, light is bright and dark is not.
Exactly!
Twaddle? It amazes me how Gnosticism, which arose shortly after Jesus’s time, is not taken seriously, yet Mormonism is somehow considered valid, even though it’s mostly cribbed from 18th century books about the supposed Mound Builders.
I mean, seriously, it’s not that much later than what is considered to be canon in the Bible, and indeed, some, like the Gospel of Thomas might be older. And the Gospel of John in the BIble does have some Gnostic aspects as well.
Anyway, regardless of what you think, the Gospel of Mary dates to the early-mid 2nd century AD, so the idea that Jesus was married to her is about as old as the idea of Jesus himself.
Indeed, that Gospel pretty much contains a description of the current reaction.
“2) But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, Say what you wish to say about what she has said. I at least do not believe that the Savior said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas.
3) Peter answered and spoke concerning these same things.
4) He questioned them about the Savior: Did He really speak privately with a woman and not openly to us? Are we to turn about and all listen to her? Did He prefer her to us?
5) Then Mary wept and said to Peter, My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I have thought this up myself in my heart, or that I am lying about the Savior?
6) Levi answered and said to Peter, Peter you have always been hot tempered.
7) Now I see you contending against the woman like the adversaries.
8) But if the Savior made her worthy, who are you indeed to reject her? Surely the Savior knows her very well.
9) That is why He loved her more than us. Rather let us be ashamed and put on the perfect Man, and separate as He commanded us and preach the gospel, not laying down any other rule or other law beyond what the Savior said.
10) And when they heard this they began to go forth to proclaim and to preach.”
That part about making her worthy is the marriage reference.